<p>how’s the undergrad advising at princeton? i get that they have an emphasis on undergrads, but do you have to look for it or is it “forced” (not a bad thing at all)</p>
<p>It’s as good as it gets, a tiered system of knowledgable, informed and friendly people, including a student advisor as well as school staff.</p>
<p>Freshman year, if you’re AB, you will be given an advisor through your residential college, that is closely related to your intended field but not always (my friend is mol bio, and he got an astrophysics guy). If you’re BSE, you will be given an advisor in your department through the engineering school. My BSE advisor was extremely old and not very in touch with current happenings–he didn’t really have much to say and just approved whatever I suggested in terms of courses. They often don’t realize the difficulty of classes and will encourage you to take the hardest classes just for the heck of it, because they don’t remember their undergrad days and think it will be easy. For example, I was taking orgo freshman year and my advisor also told me to take MAT 203, the harder multivar calc one, and I immediately dropped down to MAT 201 after facing reality. </p>
<p>The AB advising system is a little bit sketchier, I’ve heard. It is plagued by professors who only know the very basics of distribution requirements and often plug their own courses or have some favorite course they pester their advisees to take, even if the kids have no interest in it and it won’t fulfill any requirements. I remember one professor was extremely gung-ho about some Bible Literature class. That said, I’m sure there are other fantastic AB advisors.</p>
<p>Voovi16, I agree with you. The advising system at Princeton leaves much to be improved. First of all, some of the advisers in the sciences, especially the natural ones like biology, are not professors themselves but are just researchers in one of the labs. As a result, although they may mean well, you feel sometimes like you’re an interruption in their busy schedule. It became quite difficult to reach my adviser because she worked so long in Lewis Thomas Lab, so I just decided to get advice from Wilson College’s Director of Studies, Dr. Axcelson, who ended up being much more readily available, and had much better advice.
With that said, she did make good suggestions for courses to take, but I had other problems which she did not have the expertise to address. I am going to request that I change my adviser when I return to campus. </p>
<p>Frankly, I think that rather than using an indiscriminate levy of faculty to serve as advisers, I believe that the school should invest in hiring qualified (meaning having some form of college degree in education, counseling and/or academic advisement) advisers. We don’t need to have one adviser for each small group of students, because barely anybody uses them in this capacity. It doesn’t work. In turn, I think Princeton could easily base all of its academic advisers out of the McGraw Center, and visits would be on an appointment basis. This means that you have access to your adviser for a single session or on a regular basis, and you’ll be speaking to a qualified professional who can get to know you and how you should proceed in your academic pursuits. Its possible that a similar system could run out of the residential colleges, but I’m uncertain as to whether the colleges have the proper facilities. Considering the frequency to which students see their academic advisers currently (very infrequently), I believe that 5 or 6 counselors per college could handle the entire population. It would be much better than having to deal with faculty who may or may not be in touch with students and their concerns.</p>
<p>What about your student advisors?</p>
<p>You must mean our Residential College Advisers, or RCAs (the equivalent of RAs at other schools). They are trained more to deal with residential and social issues in the dorm, for example room contracts and arrangements, dorm activities, conflicts between roommates and between other students in the dorm, etc. They can, and often do, give advice to their advisees about academics and what you should do/not do, but even they are busy (especially because many RCAs are seniors) and are not as reliable to be around when you need them. Although they provide a crucial viewpoint as current students, someone working in a professional capacity is needed for more involved academic matters.</p>
<p>Current students should be good enough to rely on right?</p>
<p>Yes, there are some very knowledgeable and supportive RCAs. I was lucky to have one. However, I can definitely say that not all of them will be the right resource for academic advice.</p>
<p>bump>>>>>></p>